Do Israeli jails prepare prisoners for peace?
Imagine opening your morning paper and discovering that 140,000 prisoners have just been released from United States jails. In other words, two percent of the country’s prison population has been liberated in one fell swoop. This is much like what happened in Israel when 429 Palestinian prisoners were released in an overture connected with the Annapolis summit. Their release raises the question of whether the prisoners deserved to be there in the first place. This question is troubling if you think the answer is no, and potentially more troubling if you think the answer is yes, but a third option is that the prisoners were initially violent or threatening and their attitudes changed in some way during their time in prison. As part of their release, the 429 Palestinians were each required to sign a declaration saying that they would refrain from terrorist activities, but those declarations were only the last steps in their journey through the Israeli prison system. What is more importan
